Where Do My Competitors Get Their Leads?

I have a friend who works for one of Blue Corona’s local competitors. I won’t lie—whenever he lets some competitive info slip, I feel like Nicholas Cage in National Treasure uncovering a hidden goldmine.

Truth is, we’re all dying to know what our competitors are doing. There’s a reason why Blue Corona’s free competitor analysis (which tells you how well optimized your website is for search engines vs. your competitors) is so popular.

Looking good, Bill.

So how else can you spy on your competitors? Google Analytics released a new reporting feature back in September called Benchmarking reports that allows you to compare your marketing channel to peers in your industry. There are currently 1600 industry categories, 1250 markets, a 7 size buckets to choose from.

According to Google, its Benchmarking reports can help you:

Set meaningful targets

Spot trends occurring across industries

See which channels you should be investing more in

See how your mobile engagement compares to your peers

Etc.

How to Use Benchmarking Reports in Analytics

In order to use these reports, you must have check the “Share anonymously with Google and others” box in the Account Settings tab of your account admin page.

Next, head over to the Audience tab and select “Benchmarking.” From here, you can choose from the channels, location, or devices report. If you’re interested in learning where your competitors are getting their leads from, you’re going to want to look at the channels report.

Next, you’ll want to set up the industry vertical, region, and size bucket for your company. If you’re an HVAC company in Virginia with <100 website visits a day, your settings would look like this:

Once you’ve selected your settings, Analytics will let you know how many web properties are in this benchmark (in this case, it’s 355). From here, you can take a look at how you compare to the other people in your industry and in your market:

For this example, you’ll see this company is dominating its competitors in the organic search and paid search areas, but is losing to its competitors in social. Testing out a social media campaign could be a good takeaway for this company after viewing this report. On a positive note, it also looks like whatever the company is doing for SEO and paid search (hint—it’s working with us!) is helping them beat out their competitors in these channels!

Worried You’re Losing Leads to Your Competitors?

Blue Corona can help. Our goal is to be a virtual online marketing manager (VOMM—not our greatest acronym so far) for companies that don’t have the time or resources to manage these marketing channels in-house.

The information on this website is for informational purposes only; it is deemed accurate but not guaranteed. It does not constitute professional advice. All information is subject to change at any time without notice. Contact us for complete details.